Classroom Politics

Commissioner Frank Brogan's Passion For Education Could Lead To A Rejuvenation Of Florida's Beleaguered Schools - Help The Gop Golden Boy Graduate To A Higher Political Office

June 25, 1995|By MAREGO ATHANS

"The thing I always remember about Frank was that I had a really tough wrestling team, and everybody placed in the tournament except Frank. He busted his hump, but he wasn't a very good wrestler. But he had character. He was one of those who sticks out in your mind that he was going to make it. The other kids were winning trophies and honors and Frank wasn't, but he persevered. It didn't matter if he knew the kid he was fighting was going to beat him, he'd attack him the same way. He had that little bulldog attitude."

Brogan was a sophomore, paddling along in a canoe with his friends, when Mary Hanrahan, a blue-eyed beauty with a pixie haircut, drifted toward him in another canoe. They dated in high school and through the University of Cincinnati.

That was in the early '70s, when classes were sometimes canceled because of anti-war demonstrations. Frank's hair drifted to his collar, but that was as far as he ventured into the counterculture.

Though he knew he would end up teaching, an older brother who ran an insurance agency lured him to Martin County after college to work for him. Frank and Mary were married, and he sold insurance for 2 1/2 years before giving up half his salary for a $9,075-a-year teaching job at Port Salerno Elementary School in 1978.

AND THAT'S WHERE IT all began, the little school tucked into a neighborhood of bungalow homes with fishing boats parked outside, in a small-town pocket of Florida peppered with churches, boutiques and fruit stands, in a county where, today, every official elected in a partisan race is a Republican. Here, he was the teacher who wore a jacket and tie, who let kids stand up each day and tell a "joke du jour."

On this warm evening in early June, Frank and Mary Brogan glow with the aura of hometown heroes returned, he in a navy suit and a white carnation, she in yellow. Brogan has come to speak at fifth-grade graduation, as he has every year since he left his fifth-grade post in 1983. It was on Port Salerno's stage that he announced his entry into the commissioner's race. Tonight, surrounded by parents and grandparents and children and teachers he once taught as children, he's not shaking hands; he's hugging and kissing and posing with families as the Kodak Instamatics flash.

"YOU KNOW WHAT, MRS. ROBEson? I'm not going to write a lesson plan this week," Brogan told a fellow teacher when he started his job in Port Salerno. "Let's see if they notice."

It was an act of rebellion that he would replay in Tallahassee 16 years later, when he became commissioner and proposed scrapping all of Florida's education regulations and laws and rewriting them from scratch. The state needs to unleash ingenuity, he says, by cutting the reins on schools.

Teachers were - and still are - required to fill out charts specifying what they plan to teach each day. Instead, Brogan wrote in his book: "I will not do a lesson plan this week."

"No one noticed," Betty Robeson recalls.

During his five years in the classroom, Brogan never sent a student to the office, instead choosing to talk out discipline problems on his own. As an assistant principal, he wrestled a loaded .357-caliber Magnum away from a suicidal seventh-grader.

In his teaching days, Brogan and his wife Mary, who was working at Port Salerno as a teacher's aide and eventually became assistant principal there, lived in a tiny, one-bedroom apartment and ate more than their share of baloney sandwiches and 19-cent macaroni and cheese dinners.

But it was clear to everyone that Frank Brogan wouldn't be a teacher for long. He was on just about every committee, from curriculum to boundaries. He ran community fund-raisers and went to school board meetings just for the heck of it.

"Just to see it and watch it unfold gave me a better sense of my role in the organization," he says.

Judy Burgess, executive director of the Martin County Education Association has a different take on Brogan's early activities.

"He knew where he was going and would walk over everybody else to get there," she says. "I think when he started he did have the children at heart, but then ambition took over."

A year into his teaching job, Brogan dropped out of the teachers union.

"It's time the unions lead, follow or get the hell out of the way," he says now. "Over the years they haven't led because they're not a professional organization. All they attend to is salaries. But in their arrogance they won't follow and they won't get out of the way."

After quitting the union, Brogan's rise through the ranks was legendary: In eight years he vaulted from teacher to dean to assistant principal to principal, ending up at Murray Middle School in Stuart.

Then, in 1988, when Brogan was 34, the district's 21-year elected superintendent, Jim Navitsky, retired. Brogan decided to run.

Six years later, Tom Slade, Florida's Republican party chairman, was nosing around for a candidate and kept hearing the name Frank Brogan.